The Motorola Droid 2 may ship with a pesky eFuse bootloader which has been designed specifically to prevent rooting of the phone, but little things like that have never held back the truly talented and passionate (and nerdy). The FRF91 Vanilla Android ROM - the Droid 2's first AOSP (Android Open Source Project) ROM - has just made an appearance on DroidForums.

What does this mean? Well, in and of itself, not much, but it's a huge step up from the device's previous ROMs, which brought little to no customizations.

Today, in the wee hours of the morning, Cyanogen tweeted what many people have been waiting for: video footage of CM6.1 up and running on his T-Mobile G2.

His explanation for how things work:

Basically what I'm doing is temprooting and rebooting all of userspace with CM on the sdcard. Gonna keep refining it while the really persistent and smart guys from #g2root keep working on a permanent root.

Seems like the HTC phones are really taking up the lions share of Android news lately, doesn't it? First the G2 was rooted, and shortly after we learned that HTC did its best to prevent perma-rooting. And just this morning, we heard word that the Desire HD and Z are both being delayed. Quite a mouthful, we know - but now that you're up to speed: an enterprising individual by the name of kholk over at XDA-Devs has come up with a root method for the HTC Desire Z.

Update: As Artation has pointed out in the comments below, Universal Androot has since been removed from the Market for unknown reasons. If you're still heartbent on using it though, you can download it it from here.

If you can think back to the time Universal Androot was released, you'll recall the then small xda-developers startup that allowed for one-click rooting of a very limited number of phones, all of which had to be running Android 2.1 Eclair or lower.

xda-developers forum member JsChiSurf has figured something out that I've been longing for since the day I went out and bought my shiny new HTC EVO 4G: how to change the buttons on the bottom of the HTC Sense homescreen.

We've seen Fennec (or Firefox for Android as it's now called) gradually progressing over the last few months, reaching a state of real usability in the last couple of weeks. There are many excited by Fennec's journey and the ability have a browser with near-full-desktop functionality, but it seems that even more struggle to see a place for another browser on their phone. After all, the stock Android browser is lightning-quick and works well enough for a pretty satisfying web experience.

Well it isn't CyanogenMod 6, but according to our tipster, it's close - one of the Epic 4G's first ROMS has just gone live on xda-developers, and it looks... promising, if nothing else.

While we haven't had a chance to test this ROM out ourselves, the forum post states that the ROM's standout features include:

Deodexed

Sprintware Removed

Modified MMS/SMS app

Bootup/Shutdown sounds ported from the Samsung Galaxy S I9000

Changed shutdown display screen

Choice of 4 launchers

ADW Launcher

LauncherPro

Launcher (Vanilla)

TouchWiz

AOSP apps:

Calculator

Calendar

Clock

Car Home

GenieWidget (News & Weather)

AOSP Lockscreen

EVO YouTube App

Spare Parts

Superuser

Google Maps & Google Street View are up to date

Pandora Compatible

Live Wallpapers ported from the Samsung I9000 & Samsung Fascinate:

Aurora

Blue Sea

Connection

Dandelion

Flow

Forest

Layers Of Light

Luminescence

Ocean Wave

Spark

As with most other ROMs, a full wipe of both the data and cache partitions is required, but since one of my wife's main gripes with the Epic has always been its lack of an option to play YouTube videos in HQ (something my EVO is capable of), I think the Epic Experience ROM might just be worth a try.

The invasion continues! Development of CyanogenMod 6 for the Epic 4G is clearly coming along nicely, as a picture of it running has just been released as a quick "status update" on the CM forums.

The fact that it is actually running on the device is encouraging, but we could still be pretty far away from a testable version: no downloads are available yet, and if you look at the notification bar, you'll see a pretty significant bug in this build.